CLEARED, BIKER PLANS SHIFT TO AUTOMOBILE

Howard Witt and Andrew BagnatoCHICAGO TRIBUNE

Charles S. Smith will not be bicycling to work much longer.

The 29-year-old Oak Park man who authorities said was run down by three youths as he pedaled to a Lake Street rapid transit station, the man who then shot and killed one of those youths as they closed in around him, plans to learn to drive for the first time in his life.

''He is going to get a car and a driver`s license, and, I guess, start to conform and live the safe life,'' said Smith`s attorney, Constantine Xinos.

It`s not that Smith, described by friends as a quiet, friendly, hardworking man who liked to take hunting and fishing trips to the Alaskan wilderness, lived a daredevil life before, Xinos said.

But Smith did walk through some of the city`s most dangerous West Side neighborhoods on his daily predawn journey to his job as a laborer for a produce company at the South Water Market. He carried a .38 caliber handgun for protection.

Smith used that handgun, which he kept in violation of Oak Park`s year-old handgun ordinance, for the first time a little over a week ago, in the early morning hours of Nov. 8. But it was not to fend off the attack he feared would come on the West Side. The attack came in the 500 block of Fair Oaks Avenue in Oak Park.

On Friday, eight days after he shot James Murray, 17, of River Forest, in an incident that witnesses thought was self-defense but prosecutors had labeled murder, Smith was cleared of all felony charges in connection with the killing.

Cook County prosecutors, who had charged Smith with first-degree murder and armed violence nine hours after the 2:30 a.m. shooting, opened a preliminary hearing by dropping the murder charge and replacing it with two lesser counts of voluntary manslaughter.

But Cook County Circuit Court Judge Rene Goier found no probable cause to hold Smith on the voluntary manslaughter charge. Goier made the ruling after the hearing in a Maywood branch court in which two Oak Park residents testified they had watched as Smith was cornered by the three youths who had run him down with a car.

Smith never denied that he shot Murray, a senior at Oak Park-River Forest High School. But he insisted that Murray and his two companions had attacked him and left him no choice but to defend himself.

The judge left standing two misdemeanor charges against Smith for unlawful use of a weapon and aggravated battery, and set a Monday hearing date on those matters. He also reduced to $2,000 Smith`s original $75,000 bond, the required 10 percent of which Smith had posted the night of the shooting.

Prosecutors still could opt to take the voluntary manslaughter charges before a grand jury for an indictment, but Xinos said he considered that highly unlikely.

In addition, Oak Park Police Chief Keith Bergstrom said police would consult with the village attorney next week to decide whether to charge Smith with violation of the Oak Park handgun ban, a misdemeanor. Cook County prosecutors earlier had declined to press the charge because the other charges outweighed it.

Friday`s brief court hearing capped seven days of urgent investigations by Oak Park police detectives, who continued turning up witnesses whose accounts of the shooting appeared to chip away at the state`s murder case.

Authorities have said previously that Murray and his two companions, Henri Mevs, 20, and Michael Claire, 19, both of Oak Park, left a party in the 800 block of Fair Oaks Avenue and began quarreling with Smith as he bicycled past the house. Smith flashed his handgun to warn them off, but the youths pursued him on foot and in a car, eventually knocking him from his bicycle three blocks away, authorities said. An autopsy showed Murray had been intoxicated, and Mevs told police he, too, had been drinking at the party.

One elderly woman who witnessed the shooting testified that she saw Smith pick himself up from the gutter where he had been thrown and walk toward the front door of her neighbor`s house.

But Murray cut Smith off, she said, the other two youths joined him and a struggle ensued. Murray then was shot, the woman said.

Smith said Friday he would like to see prosecutors charge Mevs, who was driving the car, with attempted murder. Prosecutors, who say they are still considering lodging additional charges in the case, told Judge Goier they had wanted Mevs and Claire to testify at Friday`s hearing but said the pair had invoked their Fifth Amendment rights to avoid potential self-incrimination.

Mevs` attorney, Scott Colky, said later in the day it was unlikely his client would pursue the aggravated battery charge he had initially signed against Smith.